Scholars hope to gain valuable insight into Charles Dickens’ great novels
using a device that erases the author’s numerous crossings out and scribbles.

Following a pilot study on his short novel, The Chimes, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, researchers have decided that significant lost passages might be unlocked from the original manuscripts of his great novels, including Bleak House.

The tantalising new technology did not produce any significant finds during the first crawl, besides a few interesting word changes. One sentence, “Years … are like Christians in that respect” originally read: “Years … are like men in one respect.”

However, Rowan Watson, a senior curator at the V&A, described the technology in The Independent today as “ingenious and inspiring”. The manuscripts show Dickens “almost thinking aloud on to paper,” he said.

Florian Schweizer, director of the Charles Dickens Museum, has said that Dickens was a furious scribbler and blotter, which means the material unearthed could be plentiful. “We're talking of tens of thousands of manuscript pages that could potentially be unlocked,” he said.

Developed by Ian Christie-Miller, a former visiting research fellow at London University, the device illustrates the hidden work with the use of a special 1mm-thick sheet, which produces a bright light when an electric current is passed through it.